By Patrick Wood
I’ve been working in agricultural GHG accounting for nearly 5 years. I remember, when I first read through the IPCC inventory, I was struck by the magnitude of the Global Warming Potential of N2O…298 times greater than carbon dioxide according to the most recent IPCC assessment report. Combined with alleviating the soil and water quality impacts of excessive fertilizer, the best practices used may also improve H2O management and soil quality at the same time. Assuming that the farmer can maintain high yields, this double or even triple whammy (I know not a very technical term, substitute stacking or bundling of ecosystem services instead if you want) of benefits over GHG emission reductions seems like a excellent win-win. However, trained as a social scientist as I started to wade into the IPCC equations for calculating N2O emissions I realized this might not happen so quickly. Later as I learned the variables involved in nitrification and denitrification process, the complexity of the nitrogen cycle, and the magnitude of the scientific uncertainty, I understood that it was going to be a few years before we would be helping farmers monetize their N2O emissions reductions.
Thankfully the time has come! Both the American Carbon Registry and the Climate Action Reserve have N2O Protocols in process. The ACR protocol has been published and the CAR Protocol is in early stages but should be usable this time next year. In addition CAR is working on a different protocol for carbon sequestration from agricultural best management practices. This is another area where it has taken some time to bring complex science into a rigorous GHG reduction/carbon offset accounting methodology that can be implemented by ag producers, but also has enough environmental integrity to be valuable in the marketplace. CCX has an ag soil carbon protocol, but many questioned its scientific validity, and the additionality of the projects.
At AgRefresh, my colleague Simon and I are participating in CAR’s Nutrient Management and Cropland Management Protocol development workgroups respectively. CAR has done an excellent job in the last 4 years of developing protocols that are scientifically defensible and rigorous providing value in the marketplace, but also clear enough to be implementable and cost effective for ag producers. Both of the current protocols in development involve Scientific Advisory Committees that will be essential in distilling the science of GHG emissions in the nitrogen and soil carbon cycles into GHG accounting/offset methodologies.
While, it will be exciting to work with producers who can use these protocols, I do anticipate an interesting frustration. Many of the management practices that will likely be employed in reducing emissions (e.g. cover cropping, and crop rotations, perennial crops, rotational grazing, better nutrient management) have been used by practitioners of sustainable agriculture for many years. One client of ours operates a 1500 head dairy in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He has been able to produce the base of his herd’s crops for the last 15 years without the use of any synthetic fertilizer! That’s very impressive in general, but especially for an operation of that size and in that location. He is therefore very likely already producing “low carbon crops”, which would transfer to the embodied emissions in his milk and cheese. But the low carbon nature of his operation cannot be monetized through offset programs. Business as usual for him is already low in fertilizer inputs and therefore the reductions cannot be monetized as offsets as they would not be additional. How can producers like this or small scale organic producers that have been low carbon for 20 or 30 years (or longer) benefit from the development of GHG accounting methodologies? I don’t see any way to justify their additionality without resulting in an unacceptable loss of offset integrity. Perhaps they can monetize the value of their low carbon products through life cycle based product labeling, or through output based intensity metrics. Either way, we are looking forward to helping ag producers capture the value of their contribution to mitigating climate change, using these improved accounting methodologies.
March 24, 2011 at 10:26 pm
It would benefit all if you would look at the influence of biochar inclusion in farm and forest soils on the level of soil carbon maintenance and on nitrogen metabolism. While there is much left to do to fully understand all the potential interactions the positive effects seem to out weigh the negatives by a wide margin. That said – biochar use should not be viewed as a panacea for large scale corporate farming. This must be stopped asap. But the small scale local implementation [particularly with any high nitrogen source (either natural or commercial)] will have major nutrient retention effects if done appropriately.
March 25, 2011 at 12:40 am
Biomass should never be just burnt, instead it should be fractionated to it’s high value uses.
Biochar systems achieve this, to fill in gaps and hopefully expand your story & research , particularly concerning Christoph Steiner’s new work with Biochar and NH3 conservation in composting systems.